I've been using CISinks refillable cartridges for about a year and a half now on my Canon MP560 and they're worked well until recently. Seems like suddenly my black inks are not printing out -- even when the inks are totally refilled. At first, the colors weren't printing accurately on paper and photo prints, (lots of orange-y hues) then I just started losing my black and greyscale sections of printouts altogether and what little color comes out now isn't accurately printed.

I tried every cleaning function on the printer but nothing seems to help. I'm wondering if over time small amounts of ink that may have collected on where the ink comes out of the cartridge into the print head and may have dried and clogged the print head. If so, I've read varying responses about how to physically clean the print heard. (rubbing alcohol and swabs?). Should I try that next or something else?

Any help would be appreciated. I've been without a printer for a couple of weeks now.

Hello. I was wondering if you can use something to poke the bottom of the cartridge to see if the sponge has dried up? This usually happens when the printer is not in use for a long period of time. Also another way to tell if the sponge is dried up would be to grab the cartridge when it's full of ink and shake it on a napkin or a piece of paper and if it drips a pretty good amount then the sponge is fine.

You might also want to consider running a few head cleaning and running test prints to force the ink to push through the nozzles.